7/2/2023 0 Comments Pictures of a bible![]() You mean our generation is not the climax of all human history? It isn’t all about us? How disappointing. But there is nothing particularly scintillating about that understanding for modern audiences. They were wrong because of a fundamental misreading of Revelation.īiblical scholars have long recognized that the book was written for a 1st century audience with 1st century concerns about the 1st century Roman Empire. Many such predictions were based on assured readings of Revelation and were demonstrably wrong - and not because the doomsayers misunderstood a detail here or there or forgot about one verse or another. The end is therefore perpetually upon us, as it was in 1959 1988 2000 2011 2021 - pick your date. ![]() So, too, has the Antichrist repeatedly risen among us: the Kaiser, Benito Mussolini, Mikhail Gorbachev (with the “ mark of the beast” on his forehead), Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin - pick your enemy of the human race. In the religious realm, virtually every major crisis has been taken to show that the prophesied signs of the end times were being fulfilled: the horrors of World War I, the Nazi threat, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, the Gulf wars, the invasion of Ukraine - not to mention all kinds of natural disasters. Latinos especially vulnerable to foreign-sourced disinformation. Social media companies spend relatively little time monitoring non-English content, making U.S. Opinion Opinion: How Spanish-language climate misinformation spreads like wildfire in the U.S. During the Cold War, Americans convinced that a nuclear exchange was inevitable put less money into their savings accounts. ![]() We may be willing to incur debts for law school or a second mortgage if we think it will pay off in the long run if we’re not so certain, we are disinclined to take the risk. Even in secular life, future expectations affect the decisions we make. This is a religious belief with clear social and political implications. This futuristic reading of Scripture swept through England and then, with a vengeance, America: The world was going to hell, and it was all according to plan. The surrealities of the Reign of Terror convinced horrified Christians in Britain that the world was coming to a crashing halt in fulfillment of the catastrophes described in Revelation. Oddly enough, the French Revolution changed all that. ![]() They were not thought to refer to a near or distant future. Throughout the long history of Christianity - from at least the 4th century to the early 19th - the vast majority of those who read and heard the stories in the Bible (including the forerunners of modern evangelicals) believed Revelation was describing events that had already happened or were happening in their own time in the life of the church. This is widely known among historical scholars of the Bible but scarcely at all outside our ranks. In fact, Scripture says no such thing, either in Revelation or in any other book. Although evangelicals emphatically believe these predictions, and non-evangelicals decidedly do not, it’s broadly assumed that this is indeed what the Bible predicts. Jenkins’ blockbuster “Left Behind” novels (with movie spinoffs) - has led many more Americans to believe the Bible predicts our imminent end. Popular evangelical culture - including Hal Lindsey’s bestselling 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth” and, more recently, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. "International Standard Bible Encyclopedia". The prophet probably alludes to carved figures (of gods in animal or human shapes) on the prows of vessels. In Proverbs for the King James Version "pictures of silver," the English Revised Version has "baskets (the American Standard Revised Version "network") of silver," but a more probable translation is "carvings of silver." "Pictures" stands for a slightly different word (but from the same root) in Isaiah, namely, sekhuyoth the Revised Version (British and American) renders "imagery" (the Revised Version margin "watchtowers"). In Numbers and Proverbs "pictures" represents the Hebrew word maskith, "showpiece" "figure." The context in Numbers suggests that the "pictures" or "carved figures" (the Revised Version (British and American) "figured stones") which the Israelites were to destroy were symbols of Canaanite worship and therefore foreign to the religion of Yahweh. This word (in the plural) is found 3 times in the King James Version, namely, Numbers 33:52 Isaiah 2:16 Proverbs 25:11.
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